Fans
of The Rose Society, Graceling, and Six of Crows will
thrill to the masterful world-building and fiercely flawed heroine in this
heart-pounding follow-up to Julia Vanishes, book two in the
Witch's Child trilogy.

Adventure, murder, romance, intrigue, and betrayal with a 16-year-old
heroine that is both fierce and flawed at the same time. Hypable.com

Julia and a mismatched band of revolutionaries, scholars, and thieves have
crossed the world searching for a witch. But for all the miles traveled, they
are no closer to finding Ko Dan. No closer to undoing the terrible spell he
cast that bound an ancient magic to the life of a small child. Casimir wants
that magic will happily kill Theo to extract it and every moment they hunt for
Ko Dan, Casimir's assassins are hunting them.

Julia
can deal with danger. The thing that truly scares her lies within. Her strange
ability to vanish to a place just out of sight has grown: she can now disappear
so completely that it's like stepping into another world. It’s a fiery, hellish
world, filled with creatures who seem to recognize her and count her as one of
their own.

So
. . . is Julia a girl with a monster lurking inside her? Or a monster wearing
the disguise of a girl?

If she can use her monstrous power to save Theo, does it matter?

In
this riveting second book in the Witch s Child trilogy, Catherine Egan goes deep
within the heart of a fierce, defiant girl trying to discover not just who
but what she truly is.

1.Did you always know you
wanted to be a writer or did you want to be something else?

I wrote my
first book when I was five or six years old – it was called Fast Cathy (!!) and it was about a girl
who ran races. It had ten chapters, each chapter about one page long and ending
“Cathy won the race again!” I’ve been writing ever since. I might have more
seriously considered other vocations if I had any talent at all for anything
else, but I don’t, so writing stories has always been it for me.

2.How long does it take you
to write a book from start to finish?

It depends on
the book and on what else is going on in my life. JULIA VANISHES was written in
stolen moments when my kids were tiny - from idea to completion it took a few
years. I think I once estimated about 36 000 minutes. JULIA DEFIANT and the
third Julia book each took close to a year from outline to finish - by then my
younger son was in preschool and I had a block of time in the mornings in which
to write. This year, both my kids were at school until 3 every day, and I’ve
drafted two novels and half of a third. I don’t think that rate of productivity
is sustainable, but I had a lot of ideas bottled up, and a lot of time.

3.How do you come up with
themes for your stories?

I don’t
consciously think of themes. If the germ of an idea develops enough that I make
an outline, some sense of the themes will emerge then, but I’m often surprised,
when a draft is done, to see what I was really
writing about.

This year I
wrote a revenge story that I initially thought was about family but I think is
actually about ambition, and I wrote a historical fantasy that was meant to be
about obsession and a father-daughter relationship, which it is, but loneliness
and the costs of emotional / physical deprivation emerged as major themes as
well.

4.Do you have a schedule of
when you write?

I like to
write in the mornings. As soon as I drop my kids off at school, I take a walk
to get my brain moving, then I go home and make coffee and start. Everything
else has to wait until the afternoon. My writing gets my best, freshest, most
caffeinated brain time.

5.How are you able to balance
other aspects of your life with your writing?

Right now my
kids go to school and I don’t have another job, so this balance is easier than
it has ever been or likely ever will be again. I’m trying to bask in this
golden period while I have it.

Before I had
kids, when I was working and also traveling a lot, writing was something that
happened in intermittent bursts. After I had babies, writing felt more
necessary than before, but it was kind of an act of desperation in whatever
minutes I could scrape together.

At some point
down the line, I imagine the balance will need to be reinvented all over again.
It can be hard, even when you have time
to write, to move from deep immersion in a fictional world to being fully
functioning and attentive in your real life. My kids, husband and friends are
all sadly used to me sometimes being only half-there. I’ve never found it easy
to bounce quickly between writer-me and the rest of me.

6.What elements do you think
make a great story line?

For me it is
all about the character relationships. I can appreciate a clever plot twist and
beautiful writing, but what I really want to read about is just humans being
human and interacting with other humans. Everything I write hinges most
crucially on the relationships between the characters.

7. What was the hardest thing about writing a book?

I don’t think
there is one hardest thing. Each book has its own hardest thing, and you never
know what it’s going to be until it trips you up.

8.How many books have you
written so far? Do you have a favorite?

Including JULIA DEFIANT, I’ve
written five published novels.

I have so many drafts and
half-drafts at different stages – things I’ll never go back to, things I’ll
salvage for parts and reinvent, things I love and that I hope will be published, things I wrote
forever ago and barely remember. I’m not sure I can make an accurate count.

My favorite book is, of course,
always the one I’m about to start.

9.Do you have a favorite
character?

This is
something that shifts, but right now, in my published books, I’ll go with Pia, the
creepy villain from the Julia books. Though the real answer is
Pia-in-relation-to-Julia, or Julia-in-relation-to-Pia. The complicated
Pia-Julia bond took over more with each book in the trilogy.

10.Where do you write?

At my kitchen table at home during the
week, and in cafes for an hour or so on the weekends.

11.When deciding on how to publish, what directed you to the route
you took?

I never
considered self-publishing or hybrid publishing. I just don’t have the skills.
Traditional publishing always seemed the only plausible route for me, given my
strengths (writing) and weaknesses (everything else).

12.Have you gotten feedback from family about your book(s)? What do
they think?

Nobody in my
family reads YA fantasy except for the stuff I write, which they read out of
loyalty. They are generally polite about my weird stories, sometimes more
enthusiastic than other times!

13.What kinds of things do you like to do outside of writing?

Before I had
kids, travel was my big fix. Now that my kids are a little older I find I’m
starting to plot out trips we might take again. The planning alone is a thrill.
Reading, of course. And when I can squeeze in an uninterrupted conversation
with another adult, ideally over food and / or drinks, I’m very happy.

14.What kinds of advice would you give to someone who wants to
start writing?

I never take anybody’s advice and
I don’t think anybody should take mine, either. Having said that – the only
really essential thing, and you’ll hear it again and again because it’s true,
is that you can’t be a writer if you aren’t a passionate, voracious reader. So
– read read read, and if you want to write, start writing! If you keep at it
long enough, you’ll figure out what works for you, or maybe you won’t, I don’t
know. Have I figured anything out at this point? Hard to say.

15.What is your favorite book? favorite author? Do you have an
author that inspired/inspires you to write?

A few
favorites at this moment in time – Helen Oyeyemi (in particular WHAT IS NOT
YOURS IS NOT YOURS), Karen Russell (VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE is one of the
best story collections I’ve ever read), Elena Ferrante (her Neapolitan novels
shook me to my core), Kazuo Ishiguro (who breaks my heart in new and painful
ways with every book and yet I always come back for more), and Sarah Waters,
plot-genius and wordsmith beyond compare. My most recent discovery is Min Jin Lee
– I’ve seen her compared to Dickens and I’m just going to go ahead and say
she’s better.

I know
authors who say they can’t read fiction while they are drafting something but
fiction is like food and fuel to me. I don’t know that I can pin down inspiration
– the drive to make stories goes back as far as my memory – but I have no doubt
that its roots reach into everything I read.

16. Do you have any go to
people when writing a book that help you with your story lines as well as
editing, beta reading and such?

I don’t like
to show anybody anything until I have a fairly polished draft, though my
husband is a good person to brainstorm with. Once I’ve written something, my
beta readers are my line of first defense, and then I send to my agent.

17. Are you working on anything now?

Of course! What would I do, who
would I even be, if I didn’t have a story or two or three on the go? I’m always
working on something. I like to knock out a draft and then let it sit while I
work on something different, so that when I come back to it I have (somewhat)
fresh eyes.

Right now I’ve got a couple of
drafts at various stages of revision and I’m working on something brand new that
might actually be sci fi, centering on the friendship between a spy and a
collaborator in a wartime factory where a special weapon is being manufactured.

18. Tell us 5 things that make you smile

I’m going to make this book-themed:

1. Seeing my older kid immersed in
a book. He didn’t have an easy time learning to read, but it eventually clicked
and I love to see him devouring all these awesome books now.

2. Coming across a perfect turn of
phrase

3. When someone mentions loving a
book that I loved

4. The staff-picks section in
bookstores

5. Getting the call from my local
bookstore saying the books I ordered have arrived.

19. Tell us 5 things that make you sad

Can I do this without going into
Chasm-Of-Despair territory? I don’t know… here we go… I’m trying
to keep it sort of sad-lite…

1. Making a huge casserole that
will last many nights and then forgetting to put it in the fridge before I go
to bed. Wasted food & wasted time = heartbreak-lite (this comes to mind
first because I just did that this weekend)

2. Being so far away from so many
people I love.

3. Seeing kids who feel excluded or
at a loss for how to deal with something.

4. Reading the news.

5. The hopelessness I feel faced
with the current state of the world, the political polarization that feels more
and more like an unbridgeable gulf, the utter pointlessness of everything
auuugh I knew it chasm-of-despair I shouldn’t have started!

20. If you could travel anywhere in the world to visit a place so you could
use it as a background for a book, where would it be?

One of my works-in-progress is set
on a fictional Shetland island, so I do plan to visit the Shetlands. I also
have an idea that I haven’t yet started outlining set in Tokyo, where I lived
for many years, but if I write it I will definitely need to go back there for
“research” (and sushi).